Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.

“Often,” he went on, “I wrote you letters that I tore up.”

She did not answer.  He continued—­

“I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you.  I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours.”

She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.  Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin of them with her toes.

At last she sighed.

“But the most wretched thing, is it not—­is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence.  If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.”

He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy.

“I should much like,” she said, “to be a nurse at a hospital.”

“Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling—­unless perhaps that of a doctor.”

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her.  What a pity!  She should not be suffering now!  Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her.  For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life.  Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.

But at this invention of the rug she asked, “But why?”

“Why?” He hesitated.  “Because I loved you so!” And congratulating himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Leon watched her face out of the corner of his eyes.

It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across.  The mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her blue eyes; her whole face shone.  He waited.  At last she replied—­

“I always suspected it.”

Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word.  They recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, the whole of her house.

“And our poor cactuses, where are they?”

“The cold killed them this winter.”

“Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know?  I often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds, and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers.”

“Poor friend!” she said, holding out her hand to him.

Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it.  Then, when he had taken a deep breath—­